New proposals will prioritise knowledge and scholarship over current generic
skills, writes Nick Gibb

In The Strange Death of History Teaching, published in 2009, Derek Matthews, an economics lecturer at Cardiff University, reported the results of a short history quiz he had set for 284 undergraduates over a three-year period. Sixty per cent did not know Brunel’s profession; 65 per cent did not know who was the reigning monarch when the Spanish Armada attacked Britain; 83 per cent did not know that Wellington led the British Army at Waterloo; and a staggering 88 per cent could not name a single 19th-century prime minister. Not Disraeli. Not Gladstone. Not Peel.

Professor Matthews attributed this to the way history is taught in schools: “Children playing games, role playing, drawing pictures, engaging in group discussion, trying to imagine what it feels like to be a medieval peasant or studying a range of historical source materials…” He identified the drive to teach “historical skills” rather than history itself as a key cause of the problem. This “skills versus knowledge” debate has plagued state education for over half a century – not just in the teaching of history but in all subjects, from science and maths to languages and geography.

In the next few weeks, the Government will strike a decisive blow in favour of the teaching of knowledge when it publishes its proposals for a new secondary curriculum. To parents, this will be a sensible and welcome move; but to many in Britain’s education establishment who still believe that what matters in education is not knowledge but the skill of learning “how to learn”, it will be a significant defeat.

Their argument is neatly summarised on the website of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers: “A 21st-century curriculum cannot have the transfer of knowledge at its core… it cannot be an 'academic’ curriculum where pupils spend most of their time reading and writing and learning facts that have been organised into academic 'subjects’.”

The essence of this argument is that with so much knowledge in the world, how can it be possible to select what can be taught in just 11 or 13 years of school? Wouldn’t it be better to teach children “how to learn”, so they are equipped to discover for themselves the knowledge they need? This argument is not new and did not materialise with Google. Its origins lie in a progressive view of education, which emanated from Teachers College, Columbia in New York in the 1920s. This held that children learn best by self discovery; that didactic teaching is inferior to child-led and project-based approaches; that testing children’s knowledge is wrong; and that learning some things by heart, such as multiplication tables or poetry, is stultifying.

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But as the American academic E D Hirsch argues in his book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, the idea “that a thinking skill in one domain can be readily and reliably transferred to other domains” is “a mirage”. Learning French is different from physics or maths. The only skill that transcends subjects is the ability to read fluently and write coherently. Maths is important for a range of science subjects. But these skills don’t drive the proponents of a competence-based curriculum.

The ideologically-driven, skills-based approach to teaching is at the heart of the secondary school National Curriculum, introduced in 2007. At its core are a series of aptitudes, such as a desire to produce “successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve”, “confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilled lives” and “responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society”. While these are worthy objectives, they should be delivered through the ethos of a school rather than be central objectives of an academic curriculum.

The 2007 National Curriculum translates the objectives into skills-based aims for each subject. In history, for example, it is divided into “historical enquiry”, “using evidence” and “communicating about the past”. A school can teach as little or as much as it wishes of British and world history, provided it teaches the concepts of “change and continuity”, “cause and consequence”, “significance” or “interpretation”. The detailed narrative and complexity of a period of history comes second to generic skills. Much important historic detail is lost and swaths of important periods are not taught at all. The scholarship skills of reading a history book, taking notes, precis-ing and essay writing are neglected.

What drove Prof Matthews to conduct his quiz was that in a typical tutorial “not only did students not know what the Protestant work ethic was, they had never heard of the Reformation, and one student offered the view that Martin Luther was an American civil rights leader.” The new secondary curriculum that the Government will be publishing soon is designed to address these problems. It will be a slimmed-down, but knowledge-driven, curriculum in the key academic subjects to ensure that secondary school pupils are given the cultural literacy that will enable them to participate in society.

Perhaps undergraduates will at least know that Martin Luther lived 400 years before Martin Luther King.

Nick Gibb is Conservative MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and a former minister for schools